


It’s Best If I Drown

by vargrimar



Series: The Chambers and the Valves [17]
Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Angst, Autistic Sherlock Holmes, Canon Compliant, Episode: s04e01 The Six Thatchers, Falling In Love, Grief/Mourning, Guilt, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Introspection, M/M, Missing Scene, Pining, Pre-Relationship, Season/Series 04, Survivor Guilt, in which sherlock decides what he must do in order to save john watson
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-28
Updated: 2020-02-28
Packaged: 2021-02-27 19:07:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,059
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22930711
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/vargrimar/pseuds/vargrimar
Summary: Whims of the heart are not stoic. They are fierce, selfish, vast. They push at reason and persuade against logic; pathos versus logos, a pendulum in perpetual motion.
Relationships: Sherlock Holmes/John Watson
Series: The Chambers and the Valves [17]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1640680
Kudos: 31





	It’s Best If I Drown

**Author's Note:**

> ( for I gathered your body  
> in envious capture  
> in envious thought )

_What life? I’ve been away_.

In retrospect, that had been the wrong thing to say.

Because whilst Sherlock was busy being dead, the knowledge that he could return to London and to John in the near future had kept him going. Unravelling Moriarty’s web thread by thread had not been an easy process by any means; to call it mere puzzlework would have been a great disservice to everything involved. Although some of the crimes solved between pursuing contacts and henchmen had been necessary to uproot the remainder of Moriarty’s unsavoury ilk, they were also a pleasant diversion from what had then become the norm: researching, skulking, tracking, hiding, framing, arranging for inconvenient arrests on discovered charges, setting the stage for law enforcement and Mycroft’s people round the world.

None of the intermittent cases had been with John, of course, being an entire continent away, but that hadn’t stopped Sherlock from imagining his presence. His voice, his opinions, his wry remarks—they kept playing from the nostalgic depths of Sherlock’s mind in arbitrary sound bites, frequently and without his leave, and as time wore on, it was not unusual for Sherlock to visit the John Wing of his mind palace during his scant stretches of downtime. John had indeed been an entire continent away, but between his intrusive interjections and the familiar comfort of his palace doppelgänger, Sherlock often found himself wondering how he ever managed to endure existence without him.

Which is why when Mary dies to save his life and John leaves—really, truly leaves; no texting, no talking, no emails, no phone calls, no blog comments, no contact at all—Sherlock stands alone in the sitting room of 221B Baker Street long after Mrs Hudson has gone with a memento from John’s late wife in his hands and comes to the unceremonious conclusion that on the day of his resurrection, he had been very, very wrong.

Because John has a life. Of course he has. He’s always had one. And the fact that Sherlock had, up until this point, preferred to ignore the parts of it that hadn’t involved him is his own fault entirely.

Sherlock is the one who dismissed the notion when Mycroft said John had moved on. Sherlock is the one who pushed, pulled, wheedled, persuaded, cajoled his way back through John’s resisting exosphere. Sherlock is the one who wrangled John back into his orbit, drawing him in with the crushing strength of a singularity born from the corpse of a dead star. Sherlock is the one who said “What life?” despite all evidence to the contrary and then proceeded to manipulate John back into the stifling emptiness that was his own.

It’s not a particularly startling truth. It’s not an upsetting one, either. It’s not frustrating or angering or devastating. It just… _is_.

John has a life away from Sherlock Holmes.

That’s it. That’s reality. That’s data. That’s fact.

And in that life away from Sherlock Holmes, John has a flat, a daughter, and a job.

He also has an empty, aching void where his wife once stood.

And Sherlock knows John has the right to blame him for that. In a roundabout way, he’s sort of responsible for the entire lot. If Sherlock hadn’t died, John wouldn’t have been forced to find a full-time position or a new flat. That would have prevented Mary from entering the picture, which would have then rendered Rosamund Watson a figure of the imagination, resulting in no close ties to John and therefore no close ties to Sherlock. With both connections never manufactured, Mary’s death would have been stopped.

Well, not completely. But it would have been stopped for a while. Until old age. Or an older age, at any rate. Assassins and others whose professions lie in the intelligence field tend not to last quite as long as their mundane countrymen, but if she’d wanted her death later rather than sooner, she could have had it. She’d deserved that much. The choice. The opportunity. Bleeding out on the floor of London Aquarium from a coward’s bullet is not the death she should have had.

Sherlock holds the disk between his hands, staring at the words written across its surface. _MISS ME?_ is such an eyecatcher, he thinks; of course she would have written it. Mary knew he never would have been able to resist such a lure, so he’d be guaranteed to get her message regardless of what came to pass. Echoing the old words of his dead adversary as a hook is so very her.

He slides the disk back into its packaging and thumbs it shut. Turning over in his hands, he inspects the padded envelope and lets the papery texture whisper beneath his fingertips. Plain, white, nondescript. Printed label, no handwriting, no return address. Ordinary in every way. Just another parcel with the post.

There must have been some sort of dead man’s switch in place, he thinks. Very clever. Considering her background and the fallout of AGRA, it would make sense. If she stopped reporting somewhere, stopped texting a certain number, stopped paying a certain bill, stopped whatever trigger, the live-condition would cease to be met and the parcel would be sent.

Sent to him.

Not to John, not to Janine, not to anyone else.

To him.

_I’m giving you a case, Sherlock. Might be the hardest case of your career._

A return client, he thinks, studying the parcel’s pale surface. Of all the things he would have expected from such an ominously-lettered disk, Mary becoming a return client had not been one of them. And not simply a return client; a return client with a posthumous case, one in which he holds a deeply personal stake.

To use Mary’s words, he must save John Watson.

 _Save \ˈsāv\ (v.)  
_1 _to deliver from sin._  
2 _to rescue or deliver from danger or harm.  
_3 _to preserve or guard from injury, destruction, or loss._

It won’t be a spiritual or physical task. There will be no planted rooftop assassins or hymns in dim confessionals. There will be no prayers to voice, no bullets to meet, no buildings from which to leap. There will be no criminal empires to dismantle or whippings to withstand or sermons to attend. There is only a downward descent into a mire of immeasurable grief, something wholly outside Sherlock’s acquainted realm, and he must be the one to put it to an end.

He can’t refuse. He already knows that. He is far too selfish to refuse. If he does as Mary asks and throws himself straight into the awaiting maw of hell, the chance to mend things with John will hang in the balance, and that is something he is compelled to pursue. The distance is agonising, _agonising_ , more so than he’d ever imagined, and while two years of silence between him and John had been nothing short of arduous, John had wanted him alive and breathing then; John had wished for one last miracle: _don’t be dead_.

That is no longer the case.

But he’ll do it. He will. He will brave the brimstone and harrow the hellfire. He’ll do it because John Watson must be kept alive, no matter the cost, and if putting himself in mortal danger will save John, then there is no question as to what must be done. Sherlock knows he can’t manage the ‘happy’ clause of his non-negotiable, not now, not on his own, but given the chance, given enough time, it might be possible. Alive is what matters first and foremost; happy can wait.

Amidst the sitting room’s stilled silence, Sherlock brings the parcel over to the mantel and lays it between the frame with the bat and the beetles and the old pair of magnifying glasses. Fingers firmly pressed over the disk within, he grabs the pocketknife already jutting from the wood and feels the rigid weight of it balance in his palm. He tightens his grip, lets the blunt metal sides mesh into his heartlines, feels his jaws clench.

A year and a half ago, Sherlock had got it wrong. He’d brushed the idea of John’s life aside, deeming it an impossibility—because why would John have a life outside of Sherlock? The proof was in the past. Wherever Sherlock Holmes went, Doctor John Watson followed, and it seemed that nothing, not sleep nor hunger nor meaningless girlfriends could hope to stop him. His existence had been entangled with Sherlock’s to an almost inextricable degree, and that state appeared to be nothing short of permanent.

And then Sherlock died.

Sherlock died, and that entanglement had been left to unspool in his absence. He’d spent the better part of two years chasing criminals abroad whilst his heart thrummed away within the walls of London, an ever-present reminder that he had something (some _one_ ) to come home to, and he’d naïvely thought everything would remain unchanged. He’d thought John would still be at Baker Street, patient and waiting, that he wouldn’t seek comfort or forge new relationships or… well. Move on.

So he’d dismissed it. He’d dismissed it because dismissing something is far better than letting it hurt. That is what he has done for years, for decades, and it’s difficult to do otherwise when a behaviour has been so practised it becomes propensity. Letting it pierce the façade rather than roll down his back had never been an option. At the time, he just wasn’t _capable_.

Am I capable now? he wonders, knuckles blanching round the knife’s cool metal grip. I’ve felt affection. I’ve felt anger. I’ve felt guilt. I’ve felt pain and sorrow. Is that not enough?

With a firm jaw, he stabs the parcel’s leftmost corner and whirls around on his heel. He paces the room with his hands in a tight temple beneath his chin, narrowing his focus to the force, the pressure, the texture. The wallpaper smears into a blur and the furniture tips back and forth as he makes his constant circles, but he notices little more than the path stretched before him.

There is so much to be done. It will take time and research and careful planning, of course, just as everything always does, but if Mary wishes him to walk through hell’s gates to save John, then that is what he’ll do. If it will grant him a chance to uphold his vow, to redeem himself, that is what he’ll do. If it will let him enter John’s life again, that is what he’ll do.

Sherlock takes pause in the centre of the sitting room, eyes trained on the white packaging fixed upon the mantel by the gleam of a knife. The vault that houses his heart seems smaller somehow, as if all of him had decided to tumble inward without his consent, folding together like an origami crane until there was no space left for the tremulous beat wedged between the corners and the angles.

God, he’d been wrong. That is the truth, unequivocal and stark: he’d been wrong.

And it’s a rather humbling feeling, he thinks, being wrong. If someone had told him a year and a half ago that he’d find himself so chastened by his own remark, he would have raised an eyebrow and decried it as sentimental nonsense.

And perhaps it is, in a way, but isn’t that to be expected? Whims of the heart are not stoic. They are fierce, selfish, vast. They push at reason and persuade against logic; pathos versus logos, a pendulum in perpetual motion.

His right hand slides down from his left, creeping beneath his suit jacket to smooth over the pale grey of his button-down. The cadence under his palm is strong, steady, but it feels heavier now than it ever has, as if the knot of cardiac muscle tissue there had somehow petrified under his skin and left the weight of a sinking fossil in his chest.

Sherlock knows the statement he made whilst walking the world like Lazarus of Bethany had been false in its entirety. That is demonstrable. Undeniable. It had been borne of hurt and dismay; pathos to the very core. However, the reverse was—and still is—terribly true.

It isn’t that John doesn’t have a life without Sherlock.

_What life? You’ve been away._

It’s that Sherlock doesn’t have a life without John.


End file.
